Developer: Square Enix, Lancarse
Publisher: Square Enix
Platform: PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
Tested on: PS5
The Diofield Chronicle – Review
It has only been two months since we had our first encounter with The DioField Chronicle, and we quite enjoyed what the demo build had to offer. We were very excited for the game’s full release, and we didn’t have to wait that long to continue our journey. Now, the title has been released for all major platforms, and we were able to transfer our save file from the demo, so we were ready to continue where we left off. We found ourselves battling hordes of soldiers and legendary creatures, all to protect DioField island.
Story
The DioField Chronicle revolves around a small elite mercenary group called the Blue Foxes. This small band of mercenaries is tasked with defending DioField island from the invading Empire, but you’ll also have to suppress internal struggles. The game throws you into a wartorn medieval-like world, and you’ll get to know the different characters of the small band of warriors. There is a small overarching plot where the main characters share a past, but this storyline often feels a bit forgettable. You’ll basically need to know that your kingdom is being invaded and you will have to give it your all to keep the kingdom safe.
As we mentioned in our preview of the game, we found that the game’s story was a bit all over the place. This has remained the same, and at a certain point, we somewhat stopped caring about the characters and what happened to them. The narrative feels like a generic medieval fantasy war story, with very stereotypical characters. Even though we found most of the characters charming at first, they show little evolution, and eventually, we found ourselves focusing on the gameplay rather than the story. Don’t get us wrong, the story isn’t bad, and the plot does have its moments, but we felt that it could have been a lot more interesting if the characters were not stuck in their stereotype.
Graphics
Graphically, the game looks fairly decent, but at no single point during our playthrough, we were under the impression that this was a next-gen title. The character designs are good, and the different maps don’t look too bad either. However, the maps were often very devoid of life, and we were only treated to static environments with only a few enemies that populated them. The enemy designs were also quite good, and there was a reasonable variety of troops and monsters that crossed our path. The game is played from an isometric point of view, and everything is clearly visible on the small maps. You can easily see what is going on, and the UI is also very clear and easy to work with. The third-person sections in the Blue Foxes’ encampment looked a bit dated, and even the small base in which the mercenaries resided looked very empty. Nonetheless, the base section offered a welcome break from the battles, but eventually, we resorted to teleporting from room to room, rather than actually running around the camp.
Sound
The sound design of the game is handled well. The game boasts a fairly cinematic soundtrack that gets you in the mood to further learn what is happening to the island of DioField. There is also voice acting for most of the dialogues, and this also adds a lot to the game’s overall charm. You can choose between English-voiced dialogues or Japanese voice acting. We enjoyed both options, and we can only commend both the English and Japanese voice casts on a job well done. The sound effects are fairly basic but they provide decent feedback when picking up items or when triggering skills. We did very much get annoyed by the enemy soldiers that would always shout the same line upon being defeated.
Gameplay
The DioField Chronicle is a fast-paced strategy RPG title. The game will put you in command of the elite mercenary troupe, the Blue Foxes, and you’ll go from one battle to the next. During the battles, you are able to control four characters and have four others serve as backup characters. You’ll play the game from a top-down perspective, and you’ll have to position your units and know when to play their special abilities. In the course of the missions you’ll have to battle small groups of enemies, and you will find yourself issuing orders all the time. You’ll have to reposition your characters constantly if you wish to keep an edge over your opponent.
The controls are extremely intuitive, and we didn’t miss a mouse and keyboard setup for the game at all. We were able to issue commands on the fly, and it was very easy to switch between characters and precisely trigger and hit our special attacks. There is a proper balance that you can seek out for your party, and the fact that you can even use inactive party members to use their skills is a fun mechanic to mess around with. We only struggled from time to time to select the correct character if they stood too close, as for normal movement comments we misclicked from time to time, making a character move we didn’t want to move. This was only a minor gripe we had with the controls, but this could have been easily solved if the game allowed us to zoom in further. The exact opposite is also true, as for some skills the camera then zoomed in too much, making us lose our overview of the battlefield and what damage our skill would actually do.
To strengthen your characters, you can develop new weapons, power up your special abilities or simply improve the passive abilities of the different characters. There is enough to mess around with, and we did quite enjoy seeing our characters get stronger during the course of the game. We did find that some of the upgrades only provided minimal advantages during battle.
As a whole, we very much enjoyed what The DioField Chronicle had to offer, but there were some odd design choices from time to time. For example, the shop would actually often present us with better weapons (when completing the side-quests) than those we developed ourselves. We noticed that most new party members would actually be of a higher level than the main party we had been using from the start of the game, and those new party members were also introduced in very peculiar ways. For example, to get a certain party member to join up, we embarked on a mission that revolved around that character proving how good he was in combat. To our surprise, however, we weren’t able to select that character in battle nor would he fight alongside our active party. Another party member just shows up and is immediately made a member of the group, even though this character was never really introduced. While these items are not really something that will detract from the overall fun to be had, they did break the immersion at times. Many of the new characters are also mere variations of the same character types.
Conclusion
The Diofield Chronicle is a very entertaining strategy title for PlayStation 5, and we thoroughly enjoyed playing through the game. We loved having only a small party to issue commands to on the fly, and we enjoyed the bite-sized missions and the fast gameplay. We did, however, not really care that much for the characters, as they often felt like shallow stereotypes for a generic JRPG. Even so, the overall story still motivated us to press on, and as a whole, this is a fun game you can easily play in short bursts or sink a lot of time in if you truly want to press on.
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